Holiday success, much like the rest of the year, often comes down to planning and preparation. You know how busy the rush can be, so the more you can do ahead of time, the better you’ll be able to juggle the demands of the season (while avoiding added stress!).

The first step is always to create a data-driven strategy, unique to the holidays. This time of year is often an entirely different beast from the other 10 months. If you’ve weathered the holiday madness before, then you can base your core strategy on previous years’ sales during November and December, and if not, try digging into your customer insights from the rest of the year.

Next, you should brush up on current trends and expectations of your clientele. Listen to what your customers are telling you, and adapt top trends popularized by big companies who are innovating new ways to keep their customers engaged. Or, you could just check out our 2017 Holiday Shopping Trends infographic for some good intel 😉

To help keep your strategy on track, we’ve created this handy Holiday Planner, which has a week-by-week breakdown of suggestions for marketing promotions, custom events, email and text message/SMS blasts and more to keep your customers merry throughout.

Here’s an excerpt of some insights for the coming week:

Sunday, November 19 – Saturday, November 25

Email and SMS: Send out an email with a countdown for the big November events (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday), as well as a reminder of any change in holiday hours. Take this opportunity to thank your customers, or subsets therein, for their patronage over the last year. You can either include this in the other email, or take the time to write them out by hand, and consider adding a special “thank you” gift. Don’t forget to send a day-of email for whichever holiday you’re focusing on (whether Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, or Cyber Monday) to draw customers in-store.

Social Poll:Will you be shopping on Black Friday? Small Business Saturday? Cyber Monday? All? Or, you can use this to determine what will motivate them to brave the crowds by running a poll for what matters most to them when it comes to holiday shopping over Thanksgiving weekend: Deals and discounts, VIP exclusives, Extended store hours, Loyalty Offers, and so on.